Two Minutes With… Ian Taylor, CEO of Transact

I’m 55 and live in Spalding, South Lincolnshire with my wife and three kids.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I read English at University and I still love to read outside of work. I also have a massive record collection which I like to sit back and listen to.

What do you like about working at Transact?

Having spent twenty years in financial services, it’s flattering to see everyone now doing roughly what you started two decades ago. The structure of financial services has totally changed over two decades, but Mrs Miggins’ experience of retail financial services is also better than it was, and that is gratifying.

If you could give one piece of advice to your teenage self, what would it be?

Go easy.

What three things would you do if you were head of the Financial Conduct Authority?

Make it clear that everyone is responsible for their own actions and regulate people as grown-ups.

Trust the industry more.

Spend more time thinking about detection rather than protection. The regulator tries to stop anything happening, and then it gets criticised for failing to do that, and this is the wrong approach. It needs to act more like the police in terms of solving crimes, rather than trying to stop them.

What is your industry pet peeve?

Everyone, and that means both us as employees in financial services companies, as well as those who buy products, should be responsible for their own actions, rather than the situation we have now.

What would you do if you received a windfall of £10,000?

I would buy a time machine and go back and buy more shares in IntegraFin.

What will be the key events impacting the platform market over the next twelve months?

The elephant in the room remains the question of “what is a platform?”.

There will be a lot of regulatory arbitrage in the platform space, and it will generate more and more problems for platforms and their users, but the industry is only just beginning to realise that.